On Nov 20, 2014, at 1:09 PM, Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> And, if I type in a spreadsheet from scratch, with numbers in the cells:
>
> if I started Excel for Mac 2011 in a locale with . as the decimal separator and , as the thousands separator (US locale), and save it as "Windows CSV", it writes it out with "," as the field separator, with "." as the decimal separator, and without thousands separators;
>
> if I started Excel for Mac 2011 in a locale with , as the decimal separator and . as the thousands separator (customized, based on US locale, with the decimal and thousands separator changed), and save it as "Windows CSV", it writes it out with ";" as the field separator, with "," as the decimal separator, and without thousands separators.
Sadly, this didn't work with OpenOffice - it was configured to follow the locale for the decimal separator but, in the custom locale, it didn't pick up the locale's decimal separator. Perhaps it got confused by an English-language locale with , as the decimal separator and . as the thousands separator, or perhaps not bothering to change the currency separators confused it, or something such as that.
(I'll have to see whether localeconv(), on OS X, tracks the system locale; perhaps the POSIX locale APIs make it too hard to do what OS X supports.)
